Approach to measure isotopic ratios in species using multicollector-ICPMS coupled with chromatography.

A new approach was demonstrated for the isotope ratio measurement in different elemental species of Hg using transient signal obtained by chromatography coupled with multicollector-inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (MC-ICPMS). The method based on the slope of linear regression by transient intensities of different isotopes shows improved accuracy and reproducibility (0.2-0.5 per thousand as 2 standard deviation (SD)). Internal precision (RSD) of the method is very close to the theoretical value given by the counting statistic and is better by a factor of 6 in comparison with previous conventional methods of calculation. We demonstrated that internal RSD (uncertainty) depends on regression coefficients of the linear function (R(2)). The typical internal precision of isotopic ratio measurements (0.003-0.02%) was achieved for delta(202)Hg when injecting as low as 90 pg of Hg species. With the new methodology, it is possible to (i) measure the isotopic composition when a sample and a bracketing standard have significantly different concentrations, (ii) measure the isotopic composition of different species in samples versus single species in a bracketing standard, and (iii) measure the isotopic ratios for low abundant isotopes. We demonstrated application of this method for different environmental samples and processes.